We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) vs Pure Storage FlashArray
based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Pure Storage FlashArray has a slight edge in this comparison because users were happier with its ease of deployment and features.
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"It's helping to leverage data. The storage is being utilized to implement larger, complex file sizes."
"We have never had a failure. We can upgrade as we move along with zero downtime."
"I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features."
"Replication would be one of the most valuable features."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds."
"It's very stable. It's always there when we need it. With the Dual Controller, if one drops out, the other one comes right online. We don't use any iSCSI so there is a little bit of a latency break but, over the NFS, we don't notice that switch-on. We can do maintenance in the middle of the day, literally rip a whole controller out of the chassis, and do what we need to do with it."
"We are using the AQoS operating system, which allows us to get a lot more out of our AFF systems."
"Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"The solution is very reliable."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds."
"There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"We need better data deduplication."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"In fututre releases, some focus on anti-malware should be there."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"Tech support is great with NetApp if you can get past Tier 1. A lot of times when you open a new case or do a direct dial-in with an issue, like with any support, you will definitely reach a Tier 1 level that is not particularly helpful until you get escalated to an expert."
"There is no direct storage attachment available. Most configurations require additional switches for data access."
"I would like there to be a way to break out the 40 gig ports on them. We have a lot of 10 gigs in our environment. It is a big challenge breaking out the 40 gig coming out of the filer. It would be nice to have good old 10 gig ports again, or a card that has just 10 gig ports on it."
"We currently use some thin provisioning for our planning system, but we will probably move away from thin provisioning because our Solaris planning system actually has some issues with the thin provisioning and way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system. The ZFS file system doesn't like the thin provisioning changing things and it brings systems down, which is bad."
"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."
"We should be able to manage NetApp AFF as per the desired usage and needs."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go."
"In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem, VMware vSAN and Dell Unity XT. See our NetApp AFF vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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